Just today had to go back through e-mails to show when I put certain info online. E-mail showed when I received request and what person making request viewed page. Shannon
I bet this is going to change a few things. Intel had a corporate "no packrat" policy. Email had a very short retention on the server. It seems that every time someone sued them they got the judge to force them to turn over every single email sent from any employee to any other employee for the past umpteen years that might even remotely apply to the case to them to be "analyzed" as part of due process. It was costing them a fortune to go through all the archives to comply with the court orders. So they adoped a policy of never backing up the email server and purging everything after a very short period of time. I guess the number of times they lost cases because they did not have proof was paled by the money they saved by not having to produce all that garbage on demand.
I got my own dedicated server, and kept all my email of the past 3-4 years, organised them into maps, often search for them with Google Desktop, and need old email daily.
The Supreme Court commented 2 weeks ago in regards to the Arthur Andersen (my former employer ) case that email and other documents do not need to be retained if it is part of a written policy and carried out uniformly ~ but the company still got screwed because they followed their own policy and the Supreme Court was only able to rule after the company discontinued operations!
Yes. Don't even pause long enough to read it. Especially if you have Google desktop or the Google Toolbar installed. Everyone knows that Google is reading and hoarding everything on your computer these days, even your bookmarks.
Even from a business standpoint it pays to keep an archive of old/deleted emails. Sometimes you never know when you need to dig out an old message that's got an important contact... happened to me today!